


let the stars be my eyes, then

by unveils



Category: Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 08:20:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14828742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveils/pseuds/unveils
Summary: 'I am Marya Morevna,' she thinks, but does not say. 'I am the life you will be made to remember, come to take back what you have stolen from me.'





	let the stars be my eyes, then

She tells him that in the process of relearning each other, she will conquer him again. 

He guffaws at first -- at her frail, aging figure, at her silver hair. In these new eyes of Koschei’s, she is merely human, a blank canvas untouched by their magic -- another Yelena, or maybe even a Vasilisa. She is what she always wondered if she could be, never caught in a storm of birds and girls in windows.

She tells him anyway. Always once more, rolling the smooth of his death between her simple hands, she tells him that she will conquer him again. As they go, they will relearn each other, and then, perhaps, if he returns her what she is due, he will conquer her as well. She presses this potential to his cheek, to his lips, and then finally, to the side of his nose. Death here, death there, death by the touch of her lips against his marble skin and the press of a playful finger against his nose to remind him that there never was a girl untouched by magic, only a girl waiting, a girl wanting. 

That she is not another Yelena. 

He returns her touch with one of force, with hands that bruise like wrecking balls. This touch is not a man’s touch, and she reminds him -- always once more -- that if she is not a Yelena, he is not an Ivan.

_ Who are you? _ He asks her, after guffawing, after bruising, after finding himself lost in the weave of their endless story, as she herself has so many times. 

_ I am Marya Morevna,  _ she thinks, but does not say.  _ And I am the life you have lost.  _

 

\-- 

 

At first, she thinks he does not want to remember. It is easier in this land of the dead to know suffering as the feeling of a dull knife cutting you open slowly and carefully, one aching year at a time. Life is suffering in contrast, vibrant and sharp, the taste of blood in your mouth after the punch. Remembering is the second kind of suffering, dreary and useless for the dead who only know hunger for life and anger for loss. 

The first night, she sends him back to his Yelena with a hunger for the blood in his mouth. He who has never truly touched death, only forgotten what it means to be alive. It is a seed that will grow as surely as she knows her husband who also has no use for dead things, for remembering only for the dull knife.

She finds work in this false Buyan to play her part, falling in line at the feet of Baba Yaga as she once did. They never speak again of the secret between them, but Marya knows how shared secrets can create magic with or without words. The work is grueling, even as a mere barmaid, Yaga makes sure of that. Marya thanks her with blood in her mouth, a reminder that she can still feel what it means to exist beyond this realm of ghosts. 

On the fourth day, she goes to Lebedeva when she is sure her eyes will stay true, that her bottom lip will not wibble with the tears she has only recently remembered. With a sack of ash in an dust-gray pouch that she settles atop the table, she asks for a dress, and Lebedeva abides her. It is far too plain for Marya, nothing of a warrior, a wolf, a snake, but everything of the girl she is pretending to be. She pulls at the edges and delivers a curtsey when she has been sewn in, and Lebedeva laughs like nothing has changed at all. 

So it goes. Zemiya does not remember the taste of her lips but he laughs as if nothing has changed. Nastya does not remember nights spent in her bed, sleeping soundly at her breast but laughs as if nothing has changed. 

If she is worn, if she is tired, if she is a husk of a girl living too many lives and hanging onto mere threads that dangle in front of her, then she will find strength in possibility, the smiles on their faces. 

On the twenty-sixth day, Viy finds her. A needle in a haystack, she is swept from where she sits with fists clenching onto threads. He is as tall as she remembers when he comes into the canteen, glittering silver and commanding the gaze of every neutered presence trapped in this world of ghost-husks. Koschei sits by the window with his Yelena, and his eyes fall with nothing but vague interest. 

But Marya has lived many wars, and she does not need a husband to protect her. She does not need to lock away her death, or hide the frailty of her human skin. She is a wolf, anything but a girl, the Marya Morevna that kept life itself locked in the basement of a war as if there was no one else who needed him as much as she. If she is tired, if she is worn, she will use the glimmers of hope that she has been given, and in conquering Koschei, she will conquer Viy, too. 

When she brings him his order of soup, its golden glow pales to gray, ash in a bowl pretending to be something that they can all sustain themselves with. 

“Who do you think you are?” He asks her, a smile clenched tightly between rows and rows and rows of teeth. 

_ I am Marya Morevna,  _ she thinks, but does not say.  _ And I am the life you will be made to remember, come to take back what you have stolen from me.  _

 

\-- 

 

On the day that Viy takes Baba Yaga, pulls her head far underneath the stream of forgetting, she goes to Koschei, and she tells him to remember. She does not beg, only commands, digging the brunt of her human-fingers into his death until it leaks an impossible kind of light. 

The touch of her husband’s hands against her own feel like waking from a dream, like the feel of blood in her mouth. His forehead presses like a stone against her own -- bruising familiarity -- until there is a wetness on her cheeks, light pooling endlessly from the open of her palms. 

“How many deaths I have died trying to forget you, Marya Morevna.” He breathes into her open mouth. “How my days have been filled with nothing but endless suffering, dull like the slow press of a knife into my chest.”

I am Marya Morevna, she thinks, but does not say. 

“I have returned you to change the story.”

 

\-- 

 

Recovering a world from the foundations of death’s inevitable, endless clutch is not an easy thing. 

Viy presses his finger to that spot inside her, a reminder that the war will always be going badly, for death is hungry and always waiting.

But they rebuild Buyan with the hopeful threads Marya keeps clutched between her fingers.


End file.
